It is a narrative of the assassination of Reinhard ‘The Hangman’ Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution. Binet tells us the familiar story of the lead-up and phases of World War II, punctuated with biographical details of Heydrich’s life, culminating in the story of the assassination itself, carried out by two Czech resistance fighters, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. The story is powerful and lends itself perfectly to novelisation; the evil villain, the brave resistance movement, the moment in the assassination when the Sten gun jams and nearly ruins everything, the traitorous resister who betrays the heroes, resulting in an eight-hour siege in the crypt of a church in Prague. Interspersed is the story of the novel’s own creation, all of it told in 257 numbered paragraphs.

This book is an interesting addition to a genre that is beloved and maligned in equal measure – historical fiction. Well written, adequately researched, and what we might call ‘readable’, this novel adds Binet’s name to a growing list of young French writers of the current generation preoccupied by Nazism, writers like Yannick Haenel (whose wonderful novel Jan Karski [2009] was recently translated into English as The Messenger) and Jonathan Littell, whose 900-page Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) won the Prix Goncourt in 2006, as well as the prestigious Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. It is also an excellent addition to the host of studies and biographies on Heydrich, including the recent Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (2011), by Robert Gerwarth, of University College, Dublin.

The English translation of this book is excellent. Sam Taylor, in his first translation, finds oblique and precise ways to bring Binet into English. HHhH is an ambitious and original book, one that endeavours to be an historical ‘novel’, but without the traditional tricks and ornaments of historical fiction. It succeeds in this only to a certain degree.

The book is a very postmodern examination and criticism of itself. ‘I just hope,’ Binet writes, ‘that however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.’ This is how Binet tries to avoid the gully traps of historical drama. Descriptions are described, meta-reflection is piled upon metafiction, narrative techniques are criticised just as they are used. One sentence of narrative description is vilified by the very next sentence for being part of the meretricious falsity of historical fiction: what the critic James Wood recently described as ‘postmodernism by numbers’.

Binet’s suspicion of narrated detail verges on the Platonic, and even sometimes on the puerile. Guessing at unknown details, he claims, is ‘the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything’. He criticises the little assumptions and anecdotes that fiction writers use, but, thankfully, he succumbs to them too. Himmler ‘listens in approving silence’ when Hitler is ‘adopting a sententious tone and lecturing the world’. When he learns of Heydrich’s death he ‘feels vulnerable’. These details make the story better, imagined though they may be. Inventing things in history is like planting false evidence when the floor is already strewn with real evidence, says Binet. Perhaps, but isn’t narration itself invention? Does it matter? Not at all. Even in history we can’t have empirical truth. If you want to think more about this, read the wonderful and ever-expanding True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), by Peter Carey. Or maybe even read HHhH.

Aristotle knew that the difference between fiction and history was only hypothesis. Fiction is a hypothetical. The difference between them is not what did happen, but what could. Sir Philip Sidney, in his A Defence of Poetry (c.1579, widely and probably incorrectly called ‘the first ever piece of English literary criticism’), condemns the suspicion of poetry and fiction espoused by people like Plato. Poetry (and all of narrative fiction), argues Sidney, is superior to history and philosophy because it is capable of creating imagined spaces, previously non-existent. Reading fiction can expand your moral imagination, and therefore rouse you to empathy. Its power, Sidney says, lies in its ability to move its readers to virtuous action. By all accounts, Heydrich was not a reader of literary fiction.

To create narrative you need imagination, and imagination is a very moral thing, especially when you consider the task of trying to fathom a person like Heydrich, and the bravery of his assassins. Thankfully, Binet’s resistance to his own imagination does not take over this book, or the story he tells. When we read anything, even history, we are seeking not so much facts as an experience, an imagining. Fiction might not always be exact, but it is morally truthful.

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2012